On Fri, Sep 1, 2023 at 6:59 AM Chet Ramey <chet.ra...@case.edu> wrote: > > On 8/31/23 5:15 PM, Eric Blake wrote: > > > > It's not hard to see why POSIX is choosing to have Issue 8 obsoleting > > (not removing) %b's old semantics; in the short term, nothing about %b > > changes, so your dusty-deck shell scripts will continue to work as > > they have before; but you now have enough time to update your scripts. > > History has shown us that many will not. > > > The question is whether Issue 9 (several years down the road) will be > > able to repurpose %b to mean binary literal output (only possible if > > all shell authors agree that C2X compatibility is worth it), > > Unlikely. > > > > But if POSIX _is_ able to repurpose %b (because enough shell authors > > agree that binary output is more useful these days than XSI echo > > compatibility), > > I think you'll find that, regardless of its origins, there are more scripts > using the %b specifier than you think.
i'd personally never heard of printf(1) %b before this thread, but debian code search agrees with you: https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=%5Cbprintf%5B%5E%28%5D%5B%5E%28%5D.*%25b&literal=0 (obviously there are some false positives in there, but it gives a pretty good idea.) there are only a handful of hits in the Android build, but there are hundreds in non-public codebases i have access too. > > the followon question is whether there should be a > > portable way to access the old functionality. Since %#s is currently > > unspecified, we are trying to guage feedback of how many > > implementations are willing to add that alias now, which in turn will > > affect whether Issue 9 can mandate that behavior (because everyone > > liked it) or must continue to leave it undefined. > > > > But nothing is stopping coreutils from adding %#s as an extension now, > > regardless of what input other shell authors provide to the ongoing > > POSIX discussion. > > I don't have a problem adding %#s. I have a problem with POSIX not seeing > that the printf builtin is not a direct parallel to the library function > and forcing an incompatible change. > > -- > ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer > ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates > Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU c...@case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/ > >
